Writing Your First Postmortem

I’m one of the operators of Wonderland, Jimdo’s in-house PaaS for microservices.

Two weeks ago, on September 5, I did something embarrassing at work.

We were debugging a broken deployment of our central API service. This API is nothing less than the entry point for managing all container-based services running on our platform, including most of our own system services (by virtue of dogfooding).

In an attempt to fix the problem we were experiencing — our API service failed to scale to a certain number of replicas — I deleted what I believed to be a duplicate instance of the corresponding ECS service in the AWS Management Console…